


More Than ______

by recoveringrabbit



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, a still much needed conversation, discussion of Will Daniels, the event horizon does not fix all ills
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-03
Updated: 2016-05-03
Packaged: 2018-06-06 05:02:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6739141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recoveringrabbit/pseuds/recoveringrabbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Jemma tells Fitz about her encounter with Hive, and they begin to come to an understanding.</p>
            </blockquote>





	More Than ______

**Author's Note:**

  * For [agent85](https://archiveofourown.org/users/agent85/gifts).



> For Agent85, in case she never gets closure from the show.

“He tried to talk to me about Will.”

“Who did?” But he knows, and his voice pitches steeply as he hoists himself onto one elbow to see her better. “Hive?”

She nods, eyes distant. He fills her vision and she looks right past him. “Well, more accurately as Will, I suppose. Using his memories.”

His heart, which had been lighter than helium, becomes a leaden lump in his chest. Can’t the cosmos leave them be just once, he wonders with the familiar anger he thought he’d shed for good. They were good, they were happy, they were safe and content, lying fully-clothed on his bed and just being, and then—WHAM—there he was again to ruin everything. The hand not holding hers clenches into a fist before he remembers himself. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, obviously,” she says, quirking one eyebrow, “as you know for yourself. I shot him.”

“You shot Will?”

She wants to roll her eyes, he can tell, but she refrains, choosing instead to sit up and lean back against the headboard. Her hand remains in his, though, and she beats it against the covers. “No, Fitz, because Will is already dead. I didn’t even shoot Ward, more’s the pity. I shot It. I shot Hive. For all the good it will do.”

Exactly none. Maybe cause a bit of a setback, depending on what it can do to Ward’s former body, but ultimately—but ultimately, that’s not what really matters. She didn’t tell him this to discuss Hive. “No, but,” he tries again. “Are you okay?”

Her forehead wrinkles, and she pulls her knees to her chest to rest her chin on them. One cold thumb caresses his knuckles, almost thoughtlessly. It still leaves a trail of goosebumps in its wake. “Yes,” she says, slowly. “It was horrible in the moment, to have all that dredged up again, and just when we—”

Yes, just when they. Because that was the way his life and love seem to work, apparently. It can never be unalloyed. Hearing in the briefing that she had run into her jailor the Death Monster wearing their worst enemy’s face was bad enough, but to know that she had the memories of the man she loved before him in the back of her mind while they— He pushes himself to a sitting position and swings his legs over the side of the bed, taking back his hand so he can grind the heels of both hands into his eyes. Just a moment, he promises himself, and then he’ll go back to being supportive and concerned.

The mattress creaks and dips behind him. Like a butterfly, her fingers come to rest on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Fitz.”

“For what?” He wants to clutch at her hand as he did his hallucination’s, but he finds himself unable to allow even that much relief. “You didn’t do anything.”

Her voice is barely a whisper. “I did, though. He reminded me.”

“Jemma, you know, I think Will would—he would be glad that you came home, even though—”

“Yes.” She laughs mirthlessly. “So Hive said. And perhaps it’s true. I should care about that more than I do, I know, and the guilt of leaving him to die there may never go away, but. That isn’t. . . that isn’t what I meant. I meant you.” 

He turns to look at her, mouth dropped open, and her hand falls from his shoulder. The sight of him seems to prick a hole in her courage, sending her words hissing out like a leak. “I had time to think, while I was waiting for Mack and then for you, about what he said to me. . . he told me that Will wanted me to be happy, that it was time to let him go, as though I hadn’t already—and then I thought, It thinks that I still—that I ever really—and that made me wonder if you still think so, too.”

“Think what?” he asks, entirely at sea. 

She looks like the deflated husk of a party balloon as she answers, not meeting his eyes: “Think that Will was ever anything to me more than you are.”

He jerks back, almost involuntarily, and seizes his bad hand with the good one to keep it from shaking. His breath is coming fast and furious, and words race along his neural pathways without ever reaching their destination. Not that he knows what he would say if everything worked perfectly, anyway. Does he soothe her conscience and assure her he doesn’t? Does he acknowledge that he was but pretend it doesn’t matter? Or does he let the malicious whispers that haunt him in the middle of the night have their head, and remind her of what she told him in the lab and shout that he knows he’s second best but he loves her enough to be a poor man’s Will? She might love him now, but before she went to the planet it was only a maybe, and maybes aren’t enough in the face of savior hero astronauts.

“You do.” Her gaze darts from his face to his chest to his hands and back. “Oh, Fitz, you do, and that’s what I’ve done wrong.”

He shakes his head, stammering, trying to speak past the shorted connections and pulsing anger. “Jemma, you. Uh, I know that—you don’t have to say that just because of what we—did. Or are now. I don’t want you to be, to pretend that you didn’t—”

“Fitz, I’m not pretending.” She wraps her hands tightly around his, pulling his eyes to hers with the sheer force of her will. “I’m not. He was nothing to me compared to you.”

Truth rings through every syllable—he knows she believes it now, but he can’t forget. It hasn’t always been the case. “Then why did you say otherwise.”

She presses her lips together, glancing to the ceiling to dam back the tears pooling in her eyes. “Oh, Fitz, I don’t know. I didn’t understand. I felt so guilty at what I had done, and I did miss him—well, we were all each other had for five months! It was like when I was at Hydra—”

He tries to stand so he can pace, unable to look at her, but she keeps hold of his hands and refuses to let go.

“But Fitz, listen, I swear, it was nothing like missing you. I wasn’t missing the best part of myself. I didn’t wish he was here every time I breathed.”

“You still said it,” he says heavily, trying not to remember the crushing weight that had landed on his chest at the tiny, solitary affirmative.

“And I would do anything to take it back.” Tears roll down her cheeks now, but she doesn’t even bother to brush them away. “But even then. Even confused about what I felt for him, I was never confused about what I felt for you—what I feel for you, that is, because it never went away and it never changed. I’m sorry I left him to die on that planet but I’m not sorry, never sorry, I came home to you. Mostly, I’m sorry that you can’t believe that, and I’m sorry I can’t make you.”

He nods, more to show he’s heard than anything else, and stares at their hands in his lap. Silence lies heavy for a minute, broken only by the soft, shuddering sounds of her breathing.

“Fitz,” she says, finally.

He looks up through his eyelashes. Squeezing his hands one last time, she brings hers to his face and rests a hand on either cheek so he cannot look away, even if he wanted to. 

“The only thing,” she says slowly, but without pausing, as though she has been planning this speech for months, “that I am more sure of than the fact that you are the best man I’ve ever known is that I love you first, last, best, and most. And I have since we were sixteen and I will until I die.”

His heart stutters in his chest. If he was dead, he thinks dizzily, and she came and told his cold corpse she loved him, the mere sound would shock him back to life as surely as if she used the paddles. He locks into her gaze and cannot look away, searching for any reservation or hesitation, any sign that she didn’t entirely mean what she said, any sandbags to weigh down his hot-air balloon joy, because this is not the way his life works. He finds nothing. She means it. Which means— “You love me?” he says, ashamed of the way his voice cracks but powerless to stop it.

“Yes. Fitz, yes.” She kisses his cheek by her thumb, the corner of his mouth, just under his eye. “I always have. I hope someday you’ll believe me.”

“I do,” he says, and it’s true. He didn’t think she didn’t—that’s why they were cursed. It’s the rest of it that he can’t quite fathom. “First, last—”

“Best, and most,” she finishes, not letting him turn it into a question. “Hive really isn’t very clever, is he—all those memories in his head, everything that Daisy knows, and he still can’t draw the correct conclusions.”

“Which are?” he asks, hardly daring to breathe.

In response, she pulls him to her with both arms and tucks her head onto his shoulder, offering rather than taking. “You’re all, Fitz. You’re everything. And I know you can’t believe me yet, but will you trust me enough to let me show you?”

He freezes, thinking of the weight of those words, knowing she chose them intentionally: with them, she offers him her whole life. Something cracks inside him—a tiny green shoot pushing up from the dirt, the first bird of spring peeping outside a window. The sun on the horizon after a hundred days of storms. For the first time, he thinks, maybe— “Of course I trust you,” he says, holding her closer. “And I’ll try to believe you, if you’ll be patient with me.”

“Of course.” Her voice is muffled by his shoulder. “You’ve certainly been patient enough with me.”

He strokes her back with his thumb. “I love you too, you know. So we’ll have a long time to figure it out.”

“If we need it,” she says, and he can tell that she’s smiling. “We’re always better when we fix things together. And what else are we going to do with ourselves in Perthshire?”


End file.
